Dane Swan was a larrikin in the old sense of the word. He was true to his family and his mates – what the rest of the world thought of him wasn't his concern. Tattooed on his lower abdomen in large print is the Swan family motto, "Constant and Faithful". And, in his way, he was constant and faithful to Collingwood.

He was the antithesis of the modern AFL player. Team meetings bored him. (When I asked him if the game was over-coached, he answered wryly: "There is certainly a lot of them.")

He got involved in scrapes that were bad for the corporate "brand" of the AFL and his club. But he knew how to play football like fish know how to swim and, for five or six years, doing it his way, he created havoc for opposition teams and became a favourite of the Collingwood crowd.

In 2013, I spent a day with Swan driving round the old working-class suburb of Broadmeadows, his place of origin which, in many senses, he never left. "I'm a pretty simple person," he told me. "I don't have many tricks."

He certainly had no pretensions, no footy memorabilia in his home, his 2011 Brownlow Medal and All-Australian medals stuffed away in a cupboard. I asked him if they meant much to him. "Not really," he replied.

The person who gave me the best clue as to Swan's character was Pat Hearity, a teacher who knew him throughout his secondary education at St Bernard's in Essendon. Hearity said of the young Dane Swan: "He was different, he was outside the square, but he wasn't rebellious. He was never disrespectful to me or any of the other women teachers. A lot of adolescents fight the system as a way of finding their identity, but he never did. He always knew who he was." And that was pretty much Dane Swan the footballer.

He knew where the ball was going and, notwithstanding the fact he ran like a duck, he was quick across the grass. He was consistently clever in how he got the ball and what he did with it. Adding to his difference were the tattoos that grew like an inky tide to cover his whole body. When I asked him which tattoo was the most significant, he replied: "The next one." He never thought he'd play AFL. "I was more interested in having fun and being a kid. I wanted to be with my mates and I hated missing out. I still do."

He made the Calder Cannons as a forward pocket and was proceeding in an average manner when an injury to a teammate led to him being thrown into the midfield, where he promptly exhibited his prodigious skill for finding the footy.

At Collingwood, the 17-year-old Swan was described to president Eddie McGuire as "a ball magnet with an awkward running style". Eddie, an old Broadmeadows boy, liked Swan's pedigree but had concerns "about him being able to cop with the rigours of AFL football while staying true to his mates".

In 2003, Swan was convicted of affray after getting involved in a fight started by one of his mates. Swan expected the club would sack him but, instead, coach Mick Malthouse elected to give him another chance after giving him a serious talking-to. For Swan, "the penny dropped. I decided playing AFL was something I wanted to do."

For the next five years he improved each season until he developed into a highly unconventional weapon that no one knew how to counter.

Swan told me he started playing footy because his mates did and, when he finished at Collingwood, if his body permitted, he was going to play with his mates again. And have a beer with them after training on Thursday nights.